GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit

Get deep technical and business insights on the cloud from leaders at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Slack, Apple and more.

The second annual GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit, taking place June 27, 2018 at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue (11100 NE 6th St, Bellevue, WA), is the premier independent technical conference for anyone looking to get ahead in the cloud, from developers to business decision makers. Speakers include Mark Russinovich of Microsoft Azure; Milena Talavera of Slack; Peter DeSantis of AWS Global Infrastructure; Aparna Sinha of Google; Carlos Guestrin of Apple and many more. The Summit will also feature deep-dive technical sessions on:

The GeekWire Cloud Summit draws some of the leading minds in technology to discuss the revolutionary changes being brought forth via cloud computing. Hear how other folks are addressing technical problems and best practices for adopting these new technologies. Cloud technology is one of the most dynamic, rapidly growing and important areas of the tech industry, and GeekWire has a front-row seat for the revolution. Hear from industry leaders, and make connections with engineers, developers, CIOs, CTOs and others in this fast-moving and dynamic corner of the tech world.

Speakers

Mark Russinovich

CTO, Microsoft Azure

Mark Russinovich is Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s global enterprise-grade cloud platform. A widely recognized expert in distributed systems and operating systems, Mark earned a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He later co-founded Winternals Software, joining Microsoft in 2006 when the company was acquired. Today he remains the primary author of the Sysinternals tools and website, which include dozens of popular Windows administration and diagnostic utilities. Mark is a popular speaker at industry conferences such as IPExpo, Microsoft Ignite and Build, and RSA Conference. He has also authored several nonfiction and fiction books, including the Microsoft Press Windows Internals book series, as well as fictional cyber security thrillers Zero Day, Trojan Horse and Rogue Code.

Milena Talavera

Senior Engineering Manager, Slack

MilenaTalavera is a Senior Engineering Manager at Slack. Milena leads the backend infrastructure team that is responsible for building scalable and reusable systems and components that lay the foundation that Slack is built on top of. Prior to Slack, Milenawas Director of Engineering at Talkdesk, VP of Engineering at Twelvefold Media, and began her career as a software engineer for the US government. She studied at The John Hopkins University and MIT.

Peter DeSantis

Vice President, AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support

Peter DeSantis is the Vice President of AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support. In this role, he leads the AWS teams responsible for designing the datacenters, servers and network that underpin our AWS services and deploying and operating this infrastructure worldwide as well as the customer facing organizations providing support for our AWS products.

Peter joined Amazon in 1998. Prior to joining Amazon Web Services, Peter worked in various other groups within Amazon including leading the distributed systems engineering group. In March 2006, Peter joined Amazon Web Services as the General Manager of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Peter led the EC2 team through the 2006 initial launch of the service and went on to lead a number of AWS products focused on compute and networking until he accepted the role of Vice President, AWS Global Infrastructure in October 2016. In January of 2018, Peter expanded his role to include AWS Customer Support.

Peter earned a bachelor of arts with a dual major in Economics and Computer Science from Dartmouth College.

Emily Fox

Amazon Professor of Machine Learning, UW

Emily Fox is an Associate Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and Department of Statistics at the University of Washington, and is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning. She received her Ph.D. in EECS from MIT, with her dissertation being awarded the Leonard J. Savage Thesis Award in Applied Methodology and MIT EECS Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize. She has also been awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2017), Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), ONR Young Investigator award (2015), NSF CAREER award (2014), Her research interests are in large-scale dynamic modeling and computations, with a focus on Bayesian methods.

Aparna Sinha

Product Management Lead, Google

AparnaSinha leads the product team at Google for Kubernetes OSS and Kubernetes Engine. She started and co-leads the Product Management SIG to maintain an open backlog for the Kubernetes project on Github. Aparna is currently a secondary member of the CNCF Governing Board. She has worked in enterprise software for 15+ years, and was formerly Director of Product at NetApp. Aparna holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and has co-authored several technical papers during her research.

Matthew Prince

Co-founder & CEO, Cloudflare

Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks: powering more than 10 trillion requests per month, nearly 10% of all Internet requests, for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He’s also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.

Charu Jain

Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Alaska Air Group

Charu Jain serves as vice president and chief information officer for Alaska Air Group. In this role, she provides leadership for the delivery of Information Technology Services for the Company.

As Alaska Air Group CIO, Charu brings to the role a proven track record of setting and executing technology vision and delivering results. Recognized for her business and technology acumen, Charu helps Alaska navigate through change, disruption, and capture opportunity within the industry. She leads a highly engaged Organization of more than 400 information technology professionals fueled to create an Airline People Love by connecting people through technology. She builds positive, and genuine relationships with her teams and stakeholders.

In her previous roles at United Airlines, and working across industries at IBM and PWC as a thought partner and change leader, Charu has successfully delivered integrated, scalable technology solutions that enable fast-growth expansion, dramatic business efficiencies, and lasting improvements in market competitiveness, service delivery, and customer satisfaction. Charu has led major business transformation initiatives including multiple M&A efforts.

With a passion for attracting and developing STEM talent, Charu represents Alaska’s information technology interests by serving on the UW Foster School of Business MSIS Advisory Board.

Selected as Computerworld’s 2009 Premier 100 IT Leader, Charu holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA in International Management at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.

Carlos Guestrin is the senior director of machine learning at Apple and the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Carlos was the cofounder and CEO of Turi (formerly Dato and GraphLab), a machine-learning company acquired by Apple. A world-recognized leader in the field of machine learning, Carlos was named one of the 2008 brilliant 10 by Popular Science. He received the 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award for his contributions to artificial intelligence and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

David Tennenhouse

Chief Research Officer, VMware

David Tennenhouse is VMware’s Chief Research Officer. He leads the research & innovation activities that are accelerating and extending VMware’s technology leadership. These include: formation of a new VMware research group focused on networks and distributed systems; a portfolio of advanced development and incubation activities that are hosted in the product teams; in-house hackathons; experimental prototypes that are released to customers; joint research projects with VMware’s technology partners, customers and relevant startups; and the VMware academic program of engagements with university researchers.

David joined VMware from Microsoft, where he was a Corporate Vice President and led their Technology Policy group. David was previously a Partner at New Venture Partners, where he focused on the creation of spin-outs from corporate R&D teams. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Platform Strategy at Amazon and CEO of its A9.com subsidiary. Before Amazon/A9, David was Vice President and Director of Research at Intel Corporation where he pioneered an “open collaborative” approach to corporate research. This was, in part, based on his earlier work as DARPA’s Chief Scientist and Director of its Information Technology Office.

At both DARPA and Intel, Dr. Tennenhouse was involved in the strategic planning and execution of programs related to distributed/cloud computing, networking, computer architecture, wireless communications, machine learning, search/data mining, image processing, robotics, MEMs, healthcare, and nano/bio-technology. As a faculty member at MIT, he led research on high-speed networking, active networks, software radio and telecommunications policy.

David holds a B.A.Sc. and M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto and obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the FCC’s Technology Advisory Board.

Kara Sprague

SVP & GM of ADC, F5 Networks

Kara Sprague is Senior Vice President and General Manager of F5’s Application Delivery Controller (ADC) business unit, responsible for the company’s ADC product portfolio management, product and solutions.

Sprague joined F5 in 2017 from McKinsey and Company, where in her thirteen-year tenure she held various leadership positions across their technology practice. Most recently she led the Technology, Media, and Telecom Practice for the Western Region. Prior to McKinsey, Sprague was on the engineering staff of Oracle, Agilent Technologies, and Hewlett-Packard.

A trained computer scientist and electrical engineer, she holds two masters degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the board of Girls Who Code.

Jay Bartot

CTO, Madrona Venture Labs

Jay is a technologist, serial entrepreneur and machine-learning and computer vision enthusiast whose startup career spans over 20 years and includes co-founding a number of venture-backed data/analytics companies which were acquired by companies such as Microsoft, Nielsen/NetRatings and Hulu. Jay enjoys playing music, collecting instruments and electronics gear and tinkering with his 3D printer.

Tamar Eilam

IBM Fellow, Next Generation Cloud and DevOps at IBM Research

Dr. Tamar Eilam is an IBM Fellow working in the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in New York. Tamar is leading a world wide research team developing innovative technology in the area of Cloud, DevOps and Microservice management.

Padmashree Koneti

Sen. Director of Product Operations, Puppet

As senior director of product operations, Padmashree is responsible for enabling Puppet’s customers on their journey to pervasive automation. After starting out as an engineer building enterprise application software, her career evolved into include engineering management, product management, and most recently, product operations at Puppet, where she helps drive the execution of product design, development and go-to-market strategy, while evolving a vibrant engineering culture. Her approach and experience stem from a deep rooted fascination for the intersections – be it the handoff among disciplines, or the confluence of people, process and technology – to drive great business outcomes. Padmashree is passionate about using customer-centric practices to build high performing teams that deliver great software. She is a strong advocate of the agile mindset and has championed the agile transformations at several organizations in her career.

Mark Nelson

EVP of Product Development, Tableau

Mark Nelson is Executive Vice President of Product Development at Tableau where he is responsible for leading the global engineering team at Tableau, helping the company continue to broaden and deepen its industry leading analytics platform to support customers globally. Mark has more than 25 years of experience in software development, engineering, and SasS infrastructures at AT&T, Informix, Oracle and most recently at Concur, where he served as Chief Technology Officer. At Concur, Mark was responsible for all aspects of product development as well as hosting operations for their SaaS services and Concur’s internal IT function. Previously, he spent more than 16 years as Vice President and Architect at Oracle, where his last role was responsibility for much of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Nelson’s extensive cloud computing expertise also affords him a role as an Advisory Board Member for SkyTap, a cloud provider focused on transforming traditional eneterprise applications. He holds a B.S. in General Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Edith Harbaugh

CEO and Cofounder at LaunchDarkly

Edith Harbaugh is CEO & co-founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform. She has more than 15 years of experience in software engineering with both consumer and enterprise startups. She is cohost of “To Be Continuous”, a podcast on software trends. She holds two patents in deployment. Edith earned a BS, Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.

Anthony Skinner

Chief Technology Officer and Head of Product, iSpot.tv

Anthony Skinner is a veteran executive and thought leader in the software and technology space. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Product of iSpot.tv, which provides Attention and Conversion Analytics for TV ads. Throughout his career Anthony has served as a key executive at large, publicly-traded companies such as General Electric and B. F. Goodrich, as well as venture-backed companies like MediaNet Digital, Moz, and iSpot.tv. He received his degree in Economics and Computer Science from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He enjoys spending time driving his kids to soccer, swimming, and cycling in a peloton with his wife.

Subbu Allamaraju

Vice President, Expedia, Inc.

Subbu Allamaraju is an influential cloud voice both within Expedia, where he is currently a Vice President of Technology, and the industry. At Expedia, Subbu is leading a large-scale migration of Expedia’s platforms from data centers to a highly available architecture on the cloud.

Before joining Expedia in 2016, as a Distinguished Engineer at eBay Inc., Subbu helped build private cloud infrastructure and platforms for eBay and PayPal. Subbu holds a Ph.D. in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, and is a well published author, blogger and technologist.

Donna Malayeri

Product and Community Manager, Pulumi

DonnaMalayeri is a product and community manager at Pulumi, a startup that is enabling the vision of cloud infrastructure as software. Previously, she was a product manager on the Azure Functions team at Microsoft, guiding the developer experience from its beta through the first year of general availability. She is passionate about creating products that developers love, and previously worked on programming languages such as F# and Scala. In a past life, she was an academic, but now vastly prefers the experience of shipping software.

Bassam Tabbara

Founder and CEO, Upbound

Bassam Tabbara is the founder and CEO of Upbound, a new stealth-stage startup in the cloud-native computing space. He created the Rook project which is hosted by the CNCF and provides Storage Orchestration for Kubernetes. Prior to Upbound Bassam was the CTO @ Quantum, co-founder and CTO @ Symform (a P2P storage startup acquired by Quantum), and Partner Architect @ Microsoft.

Sophie Lebrecht

Director Of Operations at xnor.ai

Sophie Lebrecht is the Director of Operations at Xnor.ai. She received her PhD in Cognitive Science at Brown University. She continued to pursue her work on the neural basis of visual preference for everyday objects at Carnegie Mellon University and CMU Silicon Valley, eventually transitioning her research into the foundation of Neon Open, an open source AI platform that recommends images that drive emotion. Sophie’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, venture capital, and federal grants. Sophie’s work has been recognized for innovation, winning the World Economic Forum’s Tech Pioneers Award, the Edison Award for Innovation, Fast Company’s Most Creative in Business, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, The White House blog, Forbes, Dow Jones, and The Wall Street Journal amongst others.

Alex Legault

Associate Director of Products, PitchBook

AlexLegault is the Associate Director of Products at PitchBook, where he oversees a team of product managers and analysts that focus on the customer-facing side of the PitchBook Platform and related features like search, security, direct data, plugins and workflow tools. Legault is responsible for driving PitchBook’s dynamic product and data roadmap strategy that helped the company roll out 120 new feature updates and 500,000 new datasets in 2017 alone. Through his leadership, he plays an instrumental role in leading the strategic direction of PitchBook’s internal IT, developer and data integration initiatives. Prior to joining the company, he worked on marketing, user acquisition and business development initiatives at Social27 and ActivityPal. Alex graduated from the University of Washington in 2011.

Sanath Kumar Ramesh

Software Development Engineer II, AWS

Sanath Kumar Ramesh is a software engineer at AWS in the Serverless organization. Ramesh builds tools to make developers more productive when creating serverless applications. He built SAM, an expressive templating language to define serverless apps, and SAM CLI to make serverless app development a breeze.

Susan Galbraith

Sr. Manager of Software Development. Smartsheet

Susan Galbraith is a Senior Manager of Software Development at Smartsheet. Throughout her 20 year career, Susan has worked in a variety of different fields ranging from government to tech companies both large and small. Susan has been in management roles for the last 5 years—helping companies build teams and solve challenging problems on large-scale systems. She has hired dozens of software engineers and is passionate about mentoring others.

Chase Douglas

Co-founder and CTO of Stackery.io

Chase Douglas is the co-founder and CTO of Stackery.io, an operations console for organizations building serverless applications and services. His experience spans the gamut of technical and managerial, specifically focused on how teams of developers build products collaboratively. In prior roles he has been a VP of engineering at a web application security company, technical architect of the New Relic Browser product, and an architect of the multitouch implementation for the Linux desktop.

Sheila Gulati

Founder of Tola Capital

Ms. Gulati is the Founder of Tola Capital, an enterprise software focused venture capital firm. As a seasoned software expert, Sheila blends her financial and strategic acumen with her deep knowledge and passion for software businesses. Prior to founding Tola Capital, Ms. Gulati was the business and marketing leader for the Enterprise Application Platform for Microsoft. This responsibility included the company’s Database and Developer Platform and Tools businesses. She also co-owned the Enterprise IT strategy for Microsoft to drive a successful major business shift to capture more revenue share and seize new computing trends, including the shift to cloud computing. Ms. Gulati spent over a decade at Microsoft in other roles, including Developer and Platform Evangelism, Business Management, Corporate M&A, and Strategy.

Prior to Microsoft, Ms. Gulati was an investment banker for Robertson Stephens, where she closely partnered with her clients to drive financing, acquisitions, investments, and joint ventures. Early in her career, she spent time as a web developer for public and private sector organizations. Ms. Gulati is a second-generation software entrepreneur, and she grew up alongside her family’s software company in New York.

Joe Duffy

Co-Founder and CEO, Pulumi

Prior to founding Pulumi, Joe held leadership roles at Microsoft in the Developer Division, Operating Systems Group, and Microsoft Research, most recently as Director of Engineering and Technical Strategy for Microsoft’s developer tools. In this role, Joe led key company-wide technical initiatives, in addition to managing the groups building the C#, C++, Visual Basic, and F# languages; IoT; and all Visual Studio language, compiler, and static analysis services. Joe created and built teams around several successful distributed programming platforms, initiated and executed on efforts to take .NET open source and cross-platform, and was instrumental in Microsoft’s overall open source transformation.

Joe has 20 years of professional software experience, has been granted over 90 patents, is an author of two books, and still loves to code every day.

Prior to joining 451 Research, Nancy was Editor in Chief of the enterprise IT publications at Fierce Markets. She launched the DevOps publication, setting the editorial direction for the new coverage area, and oversaw seven publications aimed at senior enterprise IT executives.

Previously, Nancy wrote about a wide range of technology subjects, both on staff for a variety of publications and on a freelance basis. She has covered everything from the switch to digital cellular communications to the emergence of cloud computing. Her writing has appeared in The New Stack, Wired, MIT Technology Review, The Economist (Babbage blog), GeekWire and The New York Times.

Tim Porter

Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group

Tim has been investing in startups at Madrona for more than a decade. He focuses on B2B software companies providing cloud native infrastructure and automation, ML and data analytics and security. In the DevOpps and cloud world, Tim serves on the boards of Algorithmia, Highspot, Heptio, Jama Software, and Shippable.

In addition to his work at Madrona, Tim is a member of the Investment Committee for the Alliance of Angels Seed Fund I, and is also on the boards of the Washington Technology Industry Alliance and the Technology Alliance. Tim received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Uma Chingunde

Engineering Manager, Stripe

Uma Chingunde is an engineer and manager. She is currently the manager for the Compute team, a key infrastructure team at Stripe, She started her career in the distributed systems space, working on key virtual machine technology at VMware. She then worked at a startup, Delphix as an engineering manager, on one of the core teams building the Dephix virtual appliance for data management. She has degrees in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pune, India and holds two patents.

Bob Karaban

VP of Engineering, SkyKick

Bob Karaban is VP of Engineering at SkyKick. He is responsible for executing the product roadmap and building a high-performance platform that scales to 20,000 Microsoft partners and hundreds of thousands of SMB end users. Prior to SkyKick he was an Enterprise Architect designing public sector software for police and fire departments for over 9 years. Karaban grew up in Michigan and moved to the Seattle area 6 years ago, and is married with two children.

Steve Tuck

General Manager, Joyent Cloud

Steve Tuck leads a team dedicated to helping companies achieve scale through the use of Joyent’s cloud offering, working with many top companies in media, entertainment, mobile, eCommerce and gaming. He is responsible for the strategy, operations and management of Joyent’s public cloud.

Prior to joining Joyent, Steve spent 9 years at Dell where he rapidly expanded the channel business, developed the Web 2.0 offering, and led Dell’s involvement in the Facebook’s developer program launch. Steve grew up in the Bay Area and attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison where he earned Bachelor’s Degrees in Economics and Political Science.

Ying Xiong

Chief Architect, Cloud Platform, Huawei

Dr. Ying Xiong is currently responsible for leading an US R&D team and building PaaS on open source technologies for Huawei. Dr. Xiong has been involved in Kubernetes/container technologies and communities for over 3 years, ICT technologies for over 20 years. Prior to Huawei, he was a Cloud Platform Architect/Sr. Dev manager for Centrify, Principal dev manager and principal architect at Microsoft, principal technical architect and sr. dev manager at AT&T

Paige Bailey

Sr. Cloud Developer Advocate, Microsoft

Paige Bailey is a senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Prior to joining Microsoft, Paige was a data scientist and machine learning engineer in the energy industry (drilling and completions optimization, subsurface characterization).

Paige has over a decade of experience doing data analysis with Python, and 5 years of experience with R and distributed data processing using Apache Spark. She is on the core committee for JupyterCon and SciPy; is a Python instructor for EdX; and is currently writing an introductory children’s book on machine learning, as well as a technical cookbook for machine learning at scale.

Matt Weagle

Director of Infrastructure, ShiftLeft

Matt is the Director of Infrastructure at ShiftLeft, a company aiming to improve the security posture of applications in a DevOps-friendly manner. An industry veteran, Matt helped architect and subsequently lead a team responsible for developing and running Adobe’s Creative Cloud services on Amazon Web Services. As an Engineering Manager at NodeSource, Matt bootstrapped and managed a complex microservice architecture in a sustainable manner. Additionally, he is the author of the open source AWS Lambda framework Sparta (https://gosparta.io) and organizes the Seattle Serverless Meetup.

Janice Newell

CIO, Providence St. Joseph Health

Janice Newell serves as senior vice president and chief information officer for Providence Health & Services. In this role, she is responsible for setting information systems strategy, implementations and operations. Newell has more than 20 years experience in health care information technology. Prior to joining Providence in 2012, she was the chief information officer at Swedish Health Services. Prior to joining Swedish, she was the chief information officer at Group Health Cooperative. She began her career as an officer in the United States Air Force. Newell holds a master’s in business administration from Boston University and a bachelor’s in business administration from Indiana University.

Neil Holloway

Senior Vice President, Business Development, Skytap

Neil has more than 30 years of leadership experience in building, growing, and enabling technology partner ecosystems. He is responsible for Skytap’s partner strategy and overall execution. Neil has held a range of executive leadership positions, including Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions, as well as President of Microsoft EMEA and Managing Director of Microsoft UK. He was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bath for his contributions to international business.

Amy Nguyen

Software Engineer, Stripe

Amy Nguyen is a software engineer at Stripe on the observability team and she works to make data accessible for everyone. Outside of work, Amy writes about the tech industry, loves baking, and reads too many self-improvement books.

Bill Shelton

Vice President, VMware

Bill Shelton is Vice President at VMware and has over 25 years of experience in software and services design, development and operation. He is responsible for the VMware Cloud Native apps cloud services strategy. Prior to VMware, Bill served as SVP of Product at Alert Logic, General Manager at Amazon Web Services where he was responsible for the conception, development and operations of a variety of popular security and governance focused services. Prior to joining AWS, Bill ran the VMware vCloud Product Management team.

Bill has an undergraduate degree in Economics from University of New Hampshire and dual master’s degree in Engineering and Business from MIT in Cambridge, MA.

Jin Zhang

Director, Product Management VMware & Hybrid Computing, Amazon

Named Women of Influence by Silicon Valley Business Journal, Jin Zhang is a technology executive with both Fortune 100 and startup experience in enterprise software. She delivered 8-figure revenue at IBM, led engineering at Apigee to its IPO, and is now Director of Product for VMware and Hybrid Cloud at Amazon. Jin speaks regularly at technical conference and owns multiple patents in analytics. She is passionate about promoting diversity in technical companies, and she spends her spare time teaching product management and innovation at Stanford University (CSP).

Geeman Yip

Founder and CEO, BitTitan

Geeman Yip is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of BitTitan, guiding the aggressive growth and execution of all strategic company initiatives. Recognizing the limitless potential of the cloud but also the barriers confronting its adoption, Geeman founded BitTitan in 2007 to help IT service providers and businesses assess, deploy, and manage technology solutions in a rapidly changing cloud world.

Prior to BitTitan, Geeman was a program manager and early member of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite team, architecting what would become the foundation for today’s Office 365 suite. He has over two decades’ worth of experience in the software and IT spaces, including email services, identity management, telephony systems, and business productivity applications.

An active philanthropist, sailor, ballroom dancer, and mentor to young entrepreneurs in the Greater Seattle Area, Geeman holds a bachelor’s degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and is the author of multiple U.S. software patents.

Amy Chen

Systems Software Engineer, Heptio

Amy is a systems software engineer at Heptio and is passionate about distributed systems, kubernetes, and Go. In her free time, Amy runs a Youtube channel called Amy Codes where she discusses software engineering topics.

Chris Kelley

Principal, DFJ

ChrisKelley is a principal at DFJ. He is focused on investments in disruptive technologies and data platforms, and maintains deep networks in the Bay Area and Seattle. Most recently, Chris was CEO of Versive, a leading enterprise machine learning platform. Chris also co-founded Catenus Science, an organization dedicated to identifying and mentoring top-flight data science talent for high-growth companies. Prior to Versive, Chris was an investor at Formation 8, and earlier developed products at Palantir Technologies, Skybox Imaging (Google), and Authentic8. He began his career as an aerospace engineer working on unmanned systems.

Chris earned his BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Dana Fried

Senior Tech Lead/Manager, Google

After three years leading the Supply Planning Automation team, helping keep Google’s massive data center operation running, Dana is taking command of UI for Chrome on Windows in Seattle. Previously, she was Technical Lead at Phoenix Integration, where she architected software that helped NASA design missions to the moons of Jupiter. She was also responsible for much of the enemy AI in Volition, Inc.’s 2009 console title, Red Faction: Guerrilla, and has several analog game design credits. In her spare time, Dana is a mom, a dedicated partner, and captain of her roller derby league.

Madhura Maskasky

Co-Founder and VP of Product, Platform9

Madhura leads Product Management at Platform9. Before co-founding Platform9, Madhura spent 7 years at VMware Engineering, where she grew to be technical lead for several key products including vCloud Director, Update Manager and ConfigControl. Madhura helped spearhead vSphere’s transformation into a policy driven product suite, working broadly across groups to pull together the vision. Madhura holds a M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, specializing in databases and distributed systems.

Nishant Gupta

VP for Big Data and Analytics Engineering, Salesforce

Nishant Gupta is VP for Big Data and Analytics Engineering at Salesforce. He brings expertise and experience in building and running mission-critical large scale distributed systems. Prior to joining Salesforce, Nishant held several leadership positions in Engineering and Product Management at Microsoft.

Michel Feaster

CEO and Co-Founder, Usermind

Michel Feaster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Usermind. Her enterprise software career spans more than 20 years with roles in sales, product, strategic marketing and general management. Before founding Usermind, Michel was VP of Products at Apptio, where she drove product strategy, defined the category and discipline of Technology Business Management, and helped grow the company from 30 to almost 400 employees. Michel led the acquisition of Opsware by HP Software for $1.6B, managed the combined Opsware, Radia and AppIq product teams, and defined the Service Automation category. She also spent almost 8 years at Mercury Interactive learning how to build world class products like LoadRunner and QualityCenter, which made customer’s lives better. She aspires to do the same at Usermind.

Bryan Cantrill

CTO, Joyent

Bryan Cantrill is CTO at Joyent, where since 2010 he has been actively involved in Joyent’s SmartOS, Triton and Manta technologies. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Bryan led the team that designed and implemented DTrace, a facility for dynamic instrumentation of production systems that won the Wall Street Journal’s top Technology Innovation Award in 2006. He received the ScB magna cum laude with honors in Computer Science from Brown University.

Nicholas Criss

Sr. Manager, Cloud CoE and Open Source Working Group, T-Mobile

Nicholas Criss leads the Platform Services & Security team for T-Mobile’s Cloud Center of Excellence. They develop software to maximize the agility, security and efficiency of T-Mobile’s cloud applications. He got his first developer job when he was 15 and has ever since been passionate about building great software. Nicholas is also a champion of open source development and leads T-Mobile’s OSS Working Group.

Keith Weiss

Managing Director, Morgan Stanley

Keith leads the US Software Research effort at Morgan Stanley, managing a group of 5 covering analyst and with a coverage group of 55 stocks. Primary coverage responsibilities for Keith entails the large cap software names (market cap >$10 billion), including: Adobe, Autodesk, Akamai, Check Point, Citrix, Intuit, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, Symantec, Workday and VMWare. In his over 14 years at Morgan Stanley Keith has led efforts around broad technology reports on Big Data, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security and Quantum Computing.

Nathan Pearce

Developer Advocate, Office of the CTO, F5 Networks

Nathan Pearce is a Developer Advocate within F5’s Office of the CTO. He’s held positions across 3 continents in multi-national organizations, consulting practices, and start-ups. Nathan is focused on supporting CI/CD pipeline integrations, Network Infrastructure as Code, and making everything into a declarative interface.

Catherine Renwick

VP of Platform Engineering, Workday

Catherine Renwick is VP of Platform Engineering at Workday, part of the Tools and Technology team responsible for building scalable and reusable services and components that lay the foundation Workday Applications are built on. Within this scope, Catherine has worked in a wide range of technology spaces from infrastructure to transaction processing systems. Prior to Workday, Catherine was an Engineering Manager at Cape Clear Software. She started her career in Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Matt Parzybok

Director, Expedia Group

Matt has spent the last two years as a leader within the Expedia Worldwide Engineering (EWE) organization and is responsible for their cloud migration program. Matt has managed large-scale technology initiatives within the travel, financial services and media sectors for the last 15 years. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Oregon, as well as an Executive Certificate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Graduate Certificate from Multnomah Seminary.

Lucas Welch

Senior Director of Communications, Skytap

Lucas has been telling the stories and building the brands of inventive enterprise technologies for more than a decade. He currently leads Skytap’s media, analyst, employee, and social communications. Prior to Skytap, he led communications for Chef Software, helping position the IT automation provider at the epicenter of DevOps. He previously ran PR for Isilon Systems through the company’s IPO and multi-billion dollar acquisition by Dell EMC.

Agenda

Grab a bagel, meet other attendees and be sure you’ve downloaded the official GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit app sponsored by the City of Bellevue. Features include building your agenda for the day, “shaking” to connect with nearby attendees and quick access to speaker or event information.

8:50 a.m.

Opening Remarks

Grab a seat at the main stage for a brief welcome from the GeekWire team.

AI and machine learning systems are having a tremendous impact in every industry today. Rather than manually coding if-statements to solve complex problems, these systems learn to be intelligent by processing massive amounts of data. This technology has become indispensable for state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of highly visible applications, such as search, speech recognition, computer vision and interpretation of text data, as well as behind-the-scenes applications, e.g., optimizing the performance complex systems and detecting fraud in financial transactions.

This increasing dependency in AI is having a transformational impact on how we use and develop both AI and cloud systems. In this talk, I will discuss 4 trends in AI and systems technology that are significantly changing how we think about the space:

A shift to compute workloads that resemble the high-performance computing (HPC) setting, over the existing trend to massive data-parallel systems.

A shift to incorporating specialized hardware, over the existing trend to commodity hardware.

A shift to simplicity and usability of ML frameworks, over the existing trend towards flexibility and scalability.

A shift to transparency, privacy and inclusivity in AI systems, over the existing trend towards highly complex, blackbox models.

I believe these trends will continue to flourish, as AI’s foothold in industry continues to deepen.

Panel – Navigating the Engineer’s Path with Amy Chen, Heptio; Uma Chingunde, Stripe; Dana Fried, Google and Amy Nguyen, StripeAbstract: Whether just kicking off your professional journey, or working as an experienced engineer, driving your career forward takes thoughtful planning, conversation, and decision-making. This is especially true for underrepresented minorities who may not have the resources or support system to reach their goals. In this panel, engineers from various backgrounds, roles, and tenure will share tips to finding novel solutions to the challenges so many engineers face while navigating their careers.

GeekWire is excited to welcome Stripe as the Inclusion & Diversity Sponsor at the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit. We’ve worked together to make the event more diverse, and most importantly, accessible and inclusive to those who otherwise might not be able to attend. Stripe distributed 50 scholarship tickets to local organizations that serve underrepresented communities in tech and will be the host of this special lunch panel.

12:35 p.m.

Sponsored lunch talk on the main stage: Kubernetes in a multi-cloud world — Bill Shelton, Vice President, VMware

Kubernetes in a Multi-Cloud World – Bill Shelton, Vice President, VMware
Abstract: Kubernetes is the de facto container orchestrator and is on a trajectory to extend from data services to developer tool chains. How can you keep up and capture all this goodness while not having to staff a team of full-time Kubernetes experts?
In this talk, we will look at some of the trade-offs of different Kubernetes deployment models both in private and public clouds.

1:10 p.m.

General Session: CIO panel

With Janice Newell, CIO of Providence St. Joseph Health and Charu Jain, CIO at Alaska Airlines, moderated by Nancy Gohring, Senior Analyst at 451 Research

General Session: Power Talk by Peter DeSantis Vice President, AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support followed by a Fireside Chat

4:40 p.m.

Closing Remarks

FAQ

Planning to attend the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit this Wednesday? Here’s everything you need to know. If you still have questions about our biggest technical conference of the year — drawing more than 600 attendees to Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Center — please email us at events@geekwire.com.

Do I need to bring my printed tickets?No. If you’ve purchased tickets, just pick up your pass at registration, located in the main lobby of Meydenbauer Center. Registration will open at 7:45 a.m.

Agenda: Full agenda is available on the event site in the agenda tab and in the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit app. Attendees will have the option to attend sessions among five technical tracks and one business tracks:

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Serverless, presented by Expedia

DevOps and Containers, presented by F5

Software as a Service, presented by Salesforce

Hybrid Cloud, presented by Joyent

The Business of the Cloud, presented by Skytap

Note: These technical sessions are first come, first-served in terms of securing a seat.

Cloud Party at Salesforce: Join us at the Salesforce office — located at 929 108th Ave NE, Bellevue — for a fun closing party. Appetizers, beverages and amazing views to be provided. Just two blocks from Meydenbauer Center, it’s a short 9-minute walk. Capacity is limited so please RSVP if you plan to attend.

Wi-Fi: Free Wi-Fi will be available throughout the Cloud Tech Summit thanks to Wi-Fi sponsor Acumatica. Password is CloudERP. Power also will be available at select tables during the event.

Food & Drink: No need to search for your own meal — we’ve got you covered. Light breakfast will be served in the morning, and boxed lunches will be available to all attendees. We also encourage attendees to check out the sponsored lunch talk with Bill Shelton, VP of Product Management for VMware’s Cloud Native efforts. We’ve also sprinkled coffee and beverage breaks throughout the day to keep the energy flowing.

App: To keep on top of all of the action across six technical and business tracks, we’re excited to release the GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit mobile app, featuring full agenda, speakers, FAQ, live polling, alerts and more. Go here to download the app, presented by the City of Bellevue.

Social Media: We’ll be using the hashtag #gwcloudtech for the event on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.